Hacking tumblr into Becoming a CMS

Well, tumblr can’t be extended like Wordpress to become a very general-purpose CMS, but with a few little hacks at least custom layouts for projects or images are possible.

We are not going to create a Custom Page™ (like bio, contact, etc), since we want to use our tumblr content from the dashboard. Instead we will use tag pages, like /tagged/tagname, which list all posts of a given tag. Normally those will use your blog’s default layout, however we can force it to use a our own layout so that it looks more like a portfolio or a gallery.

Ad 1.

Note that these rules only apply if you are at the tag page. That’s the case when the URL looks like this: /tagged/project. You can create an entry in the menu via a tumblr page that redirects to that particular path.

Ad 2.

When CSS is not enough you can do even wilder things using JavaScript. Here I am wrapping every first image of a post in a div (while hiding everything else) and setting the background-image of that div to the source of the image, so that the CSS rules from earlier apply.